The Office of Historical Corrections(22)
“You have no idea how much you take for granted,” my mother told me the first time I’d brought a white friend home to play. But she was wrong about that—you take nothing for granted when the price of it is etched across the face of the person you love the most, when you are born into a series of loans and know you will never be up to the cost of the debt.
* * *
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“Cecilia is studying to be a doctor,” my mother told the Mortons as we waited for the ferry to depart. It wasn’t true: I had a master’s in public health, which my mother liked to think of as a stepping-stone to medical school rather than the beginning of a career in social work. When I told my father what I planned to do with my life, he told me not to blame him for the fact that I’d inherited my mother’s enthusiasm for impractical causes, but he sent me the money for the plane ticket.
“A doctor,” said Nancy. “That’s impressive. Perhaps some of your drive will rub off on Sarah. She has it in her head to go traipsing around the desert for a year.”
I looked at Sarah with real interest for the first time. She was rolling her eyes and twisting a strand of hair around her finger so tightly that her fingertips were turning red. We were built similarly, tits so that anything you wore that wasn’t a giant burlap sack bordered on obscene, but the resemblance ended there. She’d made a pillow out of her Vanderbilt sweatshirt and was resting against it, dangling one arm over the back edge of her seat.
“Cecilia has always been good with science,” my mother said. “She gets that from her father’s side. I’d wanted to look you up for years, but it was Cecilia and her tech smarts that found you. I never had much of a head for science.”
My mother was basing my scientific excellence on a ribbon I won for growing hydroponic tomatoes in the seventh grade, though I’d subsequently nearly failed biochemistry and dropped physics altogether. My father was a food critic who had recently been berated by a molecular gastronomist for identifying liquid nitrogen as “smoke” in his review. My tech smarts consisted of having entered Nancy Morton’s older brother’s name into Google. In fairness to my mother, we had, both of us, grown up without the ability to type someone’s name into the ether and receive an immediate report on their current whereabouts. I’d always known about her cousins, but only that year had it occurred to me that one of the great unanswerable questions of her life was now in fact answerable, and instantly at that. The internet did still feel like a kind of mysterious magic then, a new power we had all only recently been granted and were still learning to use. When I finally left the Bay fifteen years later—the nonprofit I worked for was shutting down and I was already barely able to keep up with my rent increases—I took a long walk through the hills and looked across the water at the city that tech rebuilt and tried to remember when I’d first seen it coming, when I’d remembered that all magic, all progress, has a price.
Even at the time, the magic I used to get us answers had a trace of the ominous: it turned out that Nancy’s brother had been killed in a car crash three years earlier. Nancy and her family had been mentioned in the obituary. I’d offered my belated condolences and invited them down to meet us on one of the Alcatraz ferries. They lived farther north, in Sonoma, and after a brief hesitation she had agreed to drive down for the day.
“Well it was different then,” Nancy said. “With girls and science. They didn’t encourage us much, did they, Anne?”
“No,” said my mother. “No, they didn’t. Lots of things were different then.”
An unsaid thing hung in the air for a moment. Ken Morton cleared his throat.
“So,” he asked, “why Alcatraz? Lovely day for it, but kind of an odd choice.”
“I was going to ask the same thing. Interesting place for a reunion. We’ve never been—just moved out here a few years ago and never got around to half the tours. I hear it’s beautiful though.”
My mother looked like she might cry. Without thinking, I moved closer to her. It hadn’t occurred to me to tell them why I had invited them here specifically. I had assumed that they would know.
“Didn’t you know?” my mother asked. “That Papa was at Alcatraz? That that’s why he—that’s why things happened the way they did?”
A moment of surprise passed over Nancy’s face, and then she collected herself.
“I had heard,” she said slowly, “that he had done some time in prison, and was never really—never really right after that. I didn’t know that it was Alcatraz. You know, I didn’t get to know him that well. Not like you did.”
“I guess you didn’t,” said my mother. “Nobody else did.”
My mother sat on one of the benches on deck and hugged her arms to her chest. I sat down beside her. I could tell she was trying not to cry. I put an arm around her and patted her shoulder gently. The Mortons looked embarrassed to be there, and then turned away to watch San Francisco disappear from view.
* * *
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Here is what you have to understand about my mother’s childhood: it wasn’t one. Her mother was the younger of Charlie and Louise’s two children, both raised on the seesaw of his impractical excesses and her Yankee frugality. At sixteen, my grandmother ran off to join a theater; two years later she came back with a Black baby. She stayed home long enough to leave my mother in her parents’ care and to meet a traveling salesman whom she ran off with a few months later. They never heard from her again. Some years later, the salesman sent a note with a copy of her obituary attached. When my mother was small, she and Papa would sit and make up stories about all the places her mother might be. Infinityland: somewhere north of Kansas, a place where you kept going and going but could never leave because it was always getting bigger. Elfworld: somewhere in West Florida, where they kept shrinking you and shrinking you and you didn’t realize you were an elf too until it was too late to do anything about it.